On 02/04/2015 10:17 AM, James B. Byrne wrote: > I had a friend, now deceased, who worked as an RCA colour TV > technician when he was very young. In the 1950s he would be sent to > the homes of people having trouble adjusting the colour settings on > their new RCA's. That was system administration then. Who needs them > now? Broadcasters. You still need color balance chops in the TV station or other video production facility; you still need sysadmins in the content delivery facilities, even if they are a bit redundant in the content consumer area. > > We are dinosaurs. People do not hate us. They just do not understand > why we are still around. > ... > Sometimes I just cannot bear to think about this stuff anymore. > Hey, James, go get a cookie, a cup of hot tea, and relax a spell....maybe fire up the old Altix box for a space heater and get nice and toasty warm or something.... Sysadmins are still around; the areas in which sysadmins are needed and the skills sysadmins need to have are just changing, that's all. TV repairmen still exist; their skillset just is very different today than what it was a few years back. High-end LED/LCD and plasma TV's are still expensive enough to merit servicing, which most of the time involves module changing, service-remote-driven diagnostic menus, and similar. I still remember needing diddlesticks to do a full convergence job; the equivalent job today involves service menus and diagnostic single-board-computers that talk to the service port.